Suncoast Delivers a Seamless Learning Experience Integrating Udemy Business with Workday

In 2025, Suncoast adopted Udemy Business as its primary learning and development platform. The credit union has licenses for all 2,500 of its employees, from frontline tellers to the executive team, providing everyone with access to anytime, anywhere learning.

In addition to these licenses, Suncoast uses Udemy Pro to provide extra resources for technical learning, with various assessments, evaluations, and labs to help employees prepare for certifications. Similarly, the Udemy Business Leadership Academy, a cohort-based program that blends live and on-demand learning experiences, helps company leaders to develop key skills.

So far, almost 80% of Suncoast’s 2,500 licenses have been allocated, with the majority of professional development focusing on topics such as Microsoft Excel, Azure, and Power BI, and Python programming proficiency. Employees have eagerly embraced soft skills learning too, covering topics like communication, body language, public speaking, and even positive thinking.

The Employee Experience Team is also working alongside the company’s VP of Business Intelligence to develop specific learning paths around AI, helping to upskill its teams for the future of finance. It’s a real mix of skills designed to aid both personal and professional development.

“People are really hungry for the opportunities to develop and learn, so we’re working with different parts of the organization to build the things they need within Udemy,” says Martinez.

Putting learning where people are

One of Udemy’s major advantages, alongside the vast scope of its course catalogue, is its ability to integrate with Suncoast’s Workday ERP solution. This means learning is automatically captured on employee records, providing instant insights into progress – all from a platform users are familiar with. A link within Workday takes learners directly to the Udemy platform, so they too can take full advantage of its features from a tool they use every day.

“The Udemy user interface is intuitive and it has more robust reporting,” says Martinez. “This way, people can use Udemy’s search functionality and the AI assistant, or build learning paths for themselves, without even realizing they’re in a different system. It provides that additional functionality, but through a really seamless experience within Workday.

With Udemy Business — and particularly with the Workday Cloud Connect for Learning integration — Suncoast reimagined its approach to talent development around a skills-based architecture. Instead of fragmented programs, learning leaders now map learning opportunities across four layers. This model stretches from support-level employees to executive leadership, providing a structured, enterprise-wide framework that ties functional training directly to professional and leadership pathways. Programs now align seamlessly to specific skill layers and career stages, making Suncoast’s learning architecture future-proof, scalable, and measurable.

Encouraging adoption through curated learning paths

Suncoast knew that encouraging adoption would be key to the success of its Udemy investment. With so many courses on offer, guiding users in the right direction was essential.

“One of the main phases of our rollout was to integrate learning paths for different streams,” says Katie Sawyer, Employee Experience Business Partner at Suncoast. “We want to help individuals build competencies regardless of their level, so people can look at the different courses and decide what best suits their professional journey.”

These learning paths unlock significant efficiencies within the organization. For one, users can pick the most relevant aspects from various courses, maximizing the value of learning time. And Udemy’s AI Learning Paths can automatically create skills trees on behalf of the Employee Experience Team, saving hours upon hours of course creation.

“The AI system does such a great job of helping to create those skills trees,” says Sawyer. “We still refine and curate, but it’s something that we have found incredibly useful.”

As specific as these paths are, however, they’re not exclusionary. By working with Udemy on content mapping for different areas of the business, Suncoast has created an environment where courses are bespoke to different roles and responsibilities within the company, but also available to those who may want to move into those areas. This supports promotion and job retention from within the company.

“We want individuals to grow and stay within the organization, so we’re working very diligently to make sure that’s possible,” says Sawyer. “That’s one of our next steps with Udemy, to create clear pathways for our people so they have a roadmap for getting to where they want to be.”